Category Kings: The Rise of Boutique Cigars

There’s big business and opportunities to be had with boutique cigars. Find out how this category grew from a niche interest to dominating the premium cigar market in recent years. By Tobacco Business -November 17, 2021

Small batch, short-run, store exclusives, limited editions—these are the many names applied to what the cigar industry often refers to as simply “boutique.” There’s no one industry-wide accepted definition of what makes a cigar or a particular tobacco manufacturer boutique. For some, it’s all about the size of a company. For others, it’s about how many cigars a company produces each year. There are some companies that embrace the boutique moniker while others do everything possible to scale beyond the perceived limitations of the boutique category.

What is clear is that boutique cigars are in a category to themselves and the companies operating in this space are big players.

The Golden Age
At some point in time, every cigar brand currently on the market was boutique. During the much-talked-about Cigar Boom of the 1990s, many saw the opportunity and appeal of turning cigars into a business. New brands that would be considered boutique by today’s standards were flooding into the market to feed the growing hunger and demand for quality cigar products. As demand waned and the industry began to reorganize following the Cigar Boom crash, the groundwork had been laid for what would become the golden age of cigars.

The 2000s saw the rise of many of today’s most well-known boutique cigar brands. There was Jonathan Drew and Marvin Samel who founded their company, Drew Estate, in 1996; Pete Johnson launched Tatuaje Cigars in 2003; Dion Giolito’s Illusione Cigars launched in 2006; Matt Booth began making cigars for his brand Room101 in 2009, and Jon Huber and Mike Conder left CAO and founded Crowned Heads in 2011. These are just a few of the entrepreneurs that found their way into the tobacco business by way of cigars, starting their own cigar brands and making their mark on a product category that was going through growing pains following a decade of tremendous growth.

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